Italian live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Italian restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Italian speakers.
Follow the conversation through the noise
- Captions the person across the table in real time
- Works through typical restaurant background noise
- Place the phone between you — no adjustment needed
- No lip reading, no facing the speaker
Restaurants abroad or with foreign speakers
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- For waitstaff, companions, or travel dining
- 60+ languages, no setup
- Translates in real time as they speak
Transcribe any recorded conversation
- Record and get the full conversation in writing
- Review anything you missed after the meal
- Organised by speaker
- Any language, any format
Key points from any conversation
- Important points extracted from any recording
- Useful for business lunches and important catch-ups
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
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Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Dinner with family in Italy is a centrepiece occasion — multiple courses, shared antipasti, bread torn and passed, and conversation that runs from starter to dessert without pause. A deaf or hard of hearing person at a Roman or Neapolitan family table needs real-time captions.
Business lunches in Milan and Rome are a significant part of professional culture. Italians conduct serious negotiations over food, and missing a nuanced comment at a two-hour lunch can mean misreading the entire relationship.
A quick espresso stop at a bar is a daily Italian ritual and a communication challenge: a rapid order, change, and greeting at a busy counter in Rome or Naples happens in seconds of fast Italian.
Travelling through Italy — from a Sicilian fish restaurant to a Venetian bacaro to a Florentine trattoria — means encountering a different regional Italian variety at every table. Captio AI captions whatever regional speech is spoken.
Group celebrations in Italy — birthday dinners, communions, summer gatherings — are long, loud, and involve large tables where multiple conversations run at once. Following an Italian family celebration without captioning means catching fragments, not the story.
A one-on-one dinner at a quieter Florentine or Milanese restaurant carries the expectation of engaged conversation in Italian. Missing the punchline — which often arrives at sentence end — creates distance that real-time captions close.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
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Built for the table — however noisy the room
Follows the person across the table
Point the microphone toward the person speaking and Captio AI captions them through the background noise. You do not need to face them, watch their lips, or lean in.
Works through restaurant noise
Restaurant noise averages 80 dBA — well above comfortable conversation level. Captio AI is built for these real environments, not quiet controlled rooms.
Place it and forget it
Put the phone on the table between you and the other person, microphone facing them. You glance at it as needed. No adjusting between sentences, no managing the setup.
No asking for repeats during the meal
Every word appears in real time. If you missed something, the caption is there — you do not need to stop the conversation and ask anyone to say it again.
Any language
For restaurants abroad, multilingual dining companions, or waitstaff who speak a different language. Live Translator captions and translates in real time with no manual setup.
Discreet
A phone on a restaurant table is unremarkable. Captio AI runs quietly, the screen faces you, and most dining companions adapt naturally once they understand what it does.
Why Italian is hard to understand
Geminate consonants
- Word pairs distinguished only by consonant length
- Italian distinguishes geminate (double) consonants from single ones — 'pappa' (porridge) vs 'papa' (pope), 'notte' (night) vs 'note' (notes). The distinction is carried purely by duration — the consonant hold is longer — with no change in lip shape or place of articulation. At a restaurant table, these pairs appear constantly in food names and daily speech.
North-south dialect continuum
- Italian varies enormously across regions
- Italian has more than 34 distinct regional varieties. Northern Italian has distinct vowel quality from Southern Italian. Vowels fully pronounced in the South are reduced or dropped in the North; consonants softened in Standard Italian are stronger in the South. A deaf person calibrated to one region's phonology is reading different lip shapes in another.
Dialectal code-switching
- Tables shift into regional dialect without warning
- In family restaurants and local trattorias — especially in Naples, Rome, Sicily, and Venice — service staff and regular customers shift into dialect mid-sentence. A Neapolitan switching into Napoletano or a Venetian server using Veneto words introduces an entirely different phonological system.
Fast connected speech
- Italian spoken at table moves very quickly
- Italian conversation at meals is animated — hands, faces, overlapping interjections, quick topic shifts. The rapid pace compresses consonant clusters, shortens unstressed syllables, and finishes sentences before a lip-reader has processed the start.
Regional vowel distinctions
- Seven-vowel system varies across regional varieties
- Standard Italian has seven vowel phonemes, but many regional varieties merge mid vowels differently. Neapolitan preserves vowel contrasts lost in Standard Italian; Northern Italian flattens others. The vowel quality a lip-reader has learned from Standard Italian does not generalise across Italy's regional spectrum.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Italy: the cost of the unheard table
Italy has approximately 3.5 million people with some form of hearing loss out of a population of roughly 59 million, with around 70,000 severely deaf. A 2009 population study estimated prelingual profound hearing loss at a prevalence rate of 0.72 per 1,000, with higher rates in southern Italy — particularly in regions with historically lower socioeconomic development. Italian Sign Language (LIS) was officially recognised by the Italian parliament only in 2021, making Italy one of the last Western European countries to do so.
The social consequences of hearing loss in Italy are acute in a culture where shared meals are the primary site of family and social bonding. A 2021 PMC study found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, only 12.8% of Italian hearing-impaired respondents felt adequately supported by health and social services — and facemasks were cited as the greatest single barrier to communication, precisely because they eliminated the lip movement that deaf and hard of hearing Italians rely on in restaurants, cafés, and public settings.
Captio AI captions Italian conversation in real time — whether a server at a Naples trattoria describes the day's fresh pasta in fast Neapolitan-inflected Italian, or family members talk over each other across a long Sunday lunch table in Rome.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat you hear stays with you.
Gone the moment it ends
Captio AI processes your audio in real time and discards it immediately. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is kept.
Not a product
Your conversations are not something Captio AI sells, shares, or monetizes — to anyone, for any reason.
Not used to train anything
What you say in a doctor's appointment or a job interview never ends up in a training dataset. Not ours. Not anyone else's.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"Roman trattorias are wonderfully loud and I used to dread them. Fast Italian, regional accent, everyone talking at once — I caught maybe a third. Captio changed that. Now I actually follow the conversation and choose when to jump in."
"Business lunches in Milan are where relationships are actually built. I was always half a step behind — catching the topic but missing the nuance. Captio shows me the full sentence in real time."
"Neapolitan shifts into dialect at the drop of a hat and it sounds completely different from Italian. Captio handles the switch accurately and I follow my family without asking them to repeat themselves in standard Italian just for me."
"Sunday family lunch in Tuscany is a four-hour event. By hour two I was always lost. Captio runs the whole time and I follow the table from antipasto through the espresso."
"Roman trattorias are wonderfully loud and I used to dread them. Fast Italian, regional accent, everyone talking at once — I caught maybe a third. Captio changed that. Now I actually follow the conversation and choose when to jump in."
"Business lunches in Milan are where relationships are actually built. I was always half a step behind — catching the topic but missing the nuance. Captio shows me the full sentence in real time."
"Neapolitan shifts into dialect at the drop of a hat and it sounds completely different from Italian. Captio handles the switch accurately and I follow my family without asking them to repeat themselves in standard Italian just for me."
"Sunday family lunch in Tuscany is a four-hour event. By hour two I was always lost. Captio runs the whole time and I follow the table from antipasto through the espresso."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Italian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store